In this article, we synthesize ethnographic data from two studies in US school districts that were implementing dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs in order to remediate the standardized test scores of students from Spanish-speaking families. While educators in both districts commonly cited "the research" to justify DLBE…

This article argues for the extension of the three goals of two-way dual language education to move beyond bilingualism and biliteracy, academic achievement, and cross-cultural understanding for all students and include critical consciousness. After a short history of the colonial aspects of the history of bilingual education in the United States,…

Choices regarding how signs are displayed in schools send messages regarding the status of languages and speakers of those languages. The monolingual paradigm can be implicitly reified by the position, shape, color, etc. of languages in relation to English on school signage (Przymus & Kohler, 2018). This can have a negative impact for…

The Language and Culture Division (LCD) provides accountability with support to districts that serve students participating in Bilingual Multicultural Education Programs (BMEPs) so that all participating students achieve the program goals as outlined by New Mexico statute and administrative code, which are: (1) students become bilingual and…

Previous research on bilingual mathematics education has proposed that as children "language mathematics" they use multiple sources of meaning. In this paper, we focus on lexical inventions--bilingual children's made up words that are not formally defined or used but follow the phonology and morphology of a language--as a source of…

James Banks's framework for determining the levels of integration of multicultural content in teachers' pedagogy has long been a tool used by researchers worldwide. This article introduces the Holistic Analysis of Multicultural Teaching Framework that rethinks Banks's framework to allow research analysis to capture the hybrid and fluid aspects of…

Although Dual Language Immersion Education is growing in popularity in the United States, staffing these programs represents one of the greatest challenges for school administrators. Ironically, this is the case even for Spanish-English Dual Language Immersion programs despite the fact that the United States has the second highest number of…

In this paper, we analyze the harm that high-stakes standardized tests in the U.S. render to maintenance-oriented dual-language bilingual primary schools and, in particular, to minoritized bilingual learners. We argue that these schools must resist the negative incentives and prevailing logic that passing standardized tests is crucial for…

Drawing on an ethnographic monitoring engagement with Kichwa intercultural bilingual educators in the Peruvian Amazon, we argue for ethnographic monitoring as a method and the continua of biliteracy as a heuristic for mapping biliteracy teaching in Indigenous contexts of bilingualism. Through our mapping, we uncover tensions in the teaching of…

Articles in this issue examine (1) the primary sources of variability in reading and language achievement among Spanish-speaking English learners (ELs) in the United States, (2) the extent to which poor performance at the end of grade 2 is identifiable in developmental trajectories beginning in kindergarten, (3) the relations among core reading…

This article reports on a formative experiment involving the implementation of long-term multifaceted vocabulary instruction in second-grade Spanish-English dual-immersion classes. The findings indicate that students in the second year of the project showed accelerated growth in English vocabulary knowledge in comparison to the norming sample of a…

This article provides a descriptive account of the workings of an Indigenous-led teacher training initiative in the Peruvian Amazon (Formabiap) and considers the extent of its transdisciplinary pedagogic approach, with a special focus on the ontological and epistemological stakes of intercultural knowledge exchanges in the context of contemporary…

This coda begins by briefly discussing the constructs at the heart of this special issue -- materials use, classroom discourse, materiality, and materials -- highlighting how the compilation contributes to the expanding definition of language learning and teaching materials. I then discuss two interrelated guiding questions of this compilation --…

This article intentionally proposes the use of anticolonial Xicana feminisms as a theoretical foundation for Spanish--English bilingual teacher preparation programs that serve a majority of Latinx aspiring teachers. An anticolonial Xicana feminist framework is imperative in order to prepare bilingual teachers to confront and counter the growing…

This paper focuses on the future of Spanish in the United States and on the tensions and challenges that surround what Fishman (1964) referred to as "intergenerational continuity..It examines the teaching of language itself and the role of such instruction in the development and maintenance of Spanish/English multicompetence (Cook, 1996),…